Rubio caught between personal, political on immigration

— Marco Rubio grew up in South Florida surrounded by a family of Cuban immigrants and working-class neighbors who knew firsthand the suffering and striving of the immigrant experience.

Today, while scaling the heights of political power, he sees immigrants stream into his U.S. Senate offices pleading for help.

Those encounters have had an impact, leaving Florida's conservative Republican senator caught between the personal and the political on the explosive immigration issue.

"Look, there's the human side to this, OK?" Rubio said during an interview in his Capitol Hill office last week. "The reality is that, yes, there are people in this country who entered illegally and take advantage of our social safety net. But the vast majority of people who come do so for one simple reason: They are looking for jobs and the opportunity to provide for their families.

"I know the immigration issue well because I've grown up around it. I've seen the positive things that come from legal immigration, and I've seen the tragedies, the negative impact of illegal immigration."

Rubio's personal experiences — on full display during a speech last month to the Hispanic Leadership Network in Miami — put him at odds with many fellow conservatives in the Republican Party, who demand stern measures to deny jobs or government benefits to illegal immigrants in hopes that they will, in the words of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, "self-deport."

Rubio, 40, the only Hispanic Republican in the Senate and widely considered a vice-presidential prospect this year, is in position to lead on this issue and advise his party's candidates on how to broaden their appeal to Hispanics, the nation's fastest-growing demographic group. Reformers, meanwhile, are pressing him to help round up support for an immigration overhaul that would give millions of foreign residents a chance to emerge from the shadows of the law.

But he has stopped short of spelling out proposals or stepping forward in a leadership role.

"I'm not the self-appointed leader of anything," he said.

Instead, Rubio is walking a fine line, mixing compassion with respect for the law while trying not to offend a party base infuriated by the illegal population, including an estimated 825,000 in Florida. When asked to reconcile these positions, he says he does not claim to have a "magic answer" but hopes to build on principles of fairness and border security supported, he says, by the vast majority of Americans.

That's why his speech last month in Miami drew notice from all sides of the debate for its empathy with illegal immigrants struggling to create a better life.

"They're all around us," he said. "You find them in Home Depot when I drive up in my pickup truck, in the desperate look of faces of men that are looking for work. You find it in homes across this community and this country, where women work hard, long hours — sometimes without documents — to send money back home."

Even skeptics were moved.

"He can't make that stuff up," said Frank Sharry, director of America's Voice, an advocacy group for immigration reform. "You can tell he gets it. But I don't know how long he can sustain his hard-line policies with that kind of powerful recognition of the humanity involved in this debate."

Rubio, in the speech and in the interview, was long on rhetoric but short on specific proposals.

He indicated support for the concept of somehow providing legal status to the children of illegal residents who go to college or serve in the armed forces. But he opposes the DREAM Act, which would give them a path to citizenship.

"Too broad, too expansive," he says. "It leads to incentives for other people to do the same thing."

As a result, he is dogged wherever he goes by "dreamers:" young people, some of them still here illegally, who hold signs and shout for him to support their cause.

"We are looking for him to back up his words by supporting policies that help the community, and so far he has been the opposite of that," said Gaby Madriz, 26, who grew up in Miami and now lives in Washington. She was holding a sign outside the Conservative Political Action Conference last week, where the senator was a star speaker, saying "Rubio: Are U for the DREAM Act or not?"

"He's a good-looking young Latino man who brings out a lot of energy from that [Republican] side. But just being a Latino isn't enough," said Madriz, who came from Guatemala with her family at age 2 and gained legal status at 14. "The Latino voters are intelligent people, and they are not going to go for somebody who just says, 'My parents are Cuban, and they came here,' and that's it."

Rubio was born in Miami to Cuban parents who entered legally. The family moved to Las Vegas when he was 8 and returned six years later to West Miami. Along the way, his father was a bartender, his mother a hotel housekeeper.

They embraced the role of exiles, though media revelations last year forced Rubio to correct his official biography to say his parents came before — not after — Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution. He acknowledged that they came for a better life, like most immigrants.

Now the senator inevitably is caught in the middle of the immigration debate. Much like former U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez, R-Fla., a Cuban-American from Orlando, Rubio quietly tries to quell some of the harsher rhetoric along the campaign trail so Republicans are not branded as anti-immigrant or anti-Hispanic.

Rubio says the best remedy for a broken immigration system is to shore up the borders, impose a computerized "E-Verify" system at workplaces to check the status of employees and create a more efficient way to admit legal immigrants.

He said he is open-minded about what to do with the illegal population and its children who grew up here, but has no proposal of his own. He seems most concerned about those striving to enter the legal way.

"We have a lot of people come into our office to say their mother or their father have applied to enter the United States, they've been waiting for a decade or longer to get in and they are still waiting," Rubio said. "What do you say to a person like that? 'Why don't you enter illegally because it would be better and easier for you?'